The versatile transcription factor Oct-1 : a crucial protein in embryonic development and a key component of the stress cellular response

摘要

Oct-1 is a transcription factor belonging to the POU family (Clerc et al.ud1988) (Herr et al. 1988) (Ryan and Rosenfeld 1997). The members of this familyudare involved in a broad range of biological processes like transcription ofudhousekeeping genes (Oct-1), pluripotency of embryonic stem cells (Oct-4) oruddevelopment of immune system (Oct-1, Oct-2) (Spaniol et al. 1996). Theudtranscription factor Oct-1 is ubiquitously expressed in embryonic and adultudtissues, and regulates the expression of a variety of genes. Previous studiesuddescribed Oct-1 to be regulated at the protein level by phosphorylation in a celludcycle dependent manner. In addition, more recently it has been shown that Oct-ud1 is induced in response to DNA damage and modulates the activity of genesudlike GADD45 important for the cellular stress response (Segil et al. 1991) (Zhaoudet al. 2000) (Jin et al. 2001) (Fan et al. 2002) (Tantin et al. 2005)..udKnockout and a conditional oct-1 knockout alleles were created in our laboratory,udand used to generate Oct-1 deficient mouse embryonic fibroblast (MEFs) andudembryonic stem cells (ES). We used them as a model to study the cellularudresponse to stress in absence of Oct-1. We have found that cells lacking Oct-1udwere less sensitive to stress like